On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 02:26:34PM +0200, Morten Kjeldgaard wrote:
> PS: To address the original question: Being a molecular biologist, my
> initial idea was to use an approach similar to that used in gene
> analysis: look at the entire set of packages installed on a specific
> system (package name and version), and then determine what known distro
> the set is closest related to.
You can check only a subset of packages (most popular ones, for example or
core packages) and compare with data you extracted the data beforehand or
somebody provides. For example, see the package data sets at
http://distrowatch.com/debian (these can be easily generated with the
Packages files from the different releases, but you have to have access to
mirrors with old releases too)
Regards
Javier